Compass

On June 4, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) published a new briefing paper that demonstrates how free trade agreements fail to lift up environmental standards. As EIA’s report demonstrates, simply including environmental obligations in trade pacts provides no guarantee that environmental protections will improve in reality.

Michael Brune's advocacy for Walmart workers, and their advocacy of stronger action on climate and clean energy by their employer, suggests that the strategic alliance between the Sierra Club and Walmart's workers is a recipe for success. Not only are the economic and climate justice movements substantively inseparable, they're simply more powerful together.

With embargoes against Myanmar, also known as Burma, recently lifted, oil, gas, and coal industrialists are hungrily looking to the “last unopened Asian market” as a new source of wealth and power. Fossil fuel companies already have big plans to drill for natural gas and build massive new coal plants, both largely for export. Many of the Burmese people, however, have other ideas.

Figuring out how to face up to utility monopolies and government leaders is daunting, especially for people still in high school, but there’s no reason why we have to do it alone. In the face of a threat to the future of solar in Utah, I worked with a local advocacy group, Utah Clean Energy, to...

Across the West Coast, where Sierra Club membership is robust and active, residents are seeing warnings of a trade deal that could disrupt the climate and the environment.The United States is currently negotiating a trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, with 11 other Pacific Rim...

How we can continue to deepen our reliance on oil, allowing pipelines to slice across our heartland and oil rigs to punch holes into the Arctic sea floor, when we see these devastating oil spill consequences again and again?

Today the Obama Administration and the EPA issued a much-needed, long-overdue public health safeguard that marks the beginning of the end of regulatory loopholes in 38 states that have for decades allowed big polluters to dump huge amounts of off-the-books harmful air pollution onto neighboring communities with impunity.

Growing up in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, I witnessed the effects of climate change and pollution directly. Every year, I saw tides of the Miles River creep closer and closer to my doorstep; I witnessed shorelines being washed away; I sat and listened as teachers, skipjacks, and waterman talked about the number of dead zones in the Bay rising, and the number of oysters diminishing; and I watched defenselessly as the unique cultures of Smith, Tangier, and Poplar Island progressively wash away. I knew there needed to be change, and Loyola’s campus seemed like a good place to start.

Though EVs are cheaper to fuel and maintain than conventional cars, they tend to have higher upfront costs. That's why we need consumer incentives for EVs to bring the cost down and accelerate consumer interest.